Category Archives: Cool

Warning: Your Kids May Be Able to Forge Your Handwriting If You Aren’t Careful

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I think every kid has at some point in their lives wished they could pen a note to school that's at least a fairly realistic forgery of their parents' handwriting.  Think of the possibilities; endless days of hooky, alibis for missing assignments, realistic alternatives to "the dog ate my homework", etc.  For today's youth that fantasy is fast becoming a reality.

YourFonts.com will convert anyone's handwriting into a TrueType font for free.  All you have to do is download a PDF template, print it, fill it out in your handwriting, scan it and upload it to the service.  The result is a font that you can be used to create and print any document you'd like. Let this be your warning: if your kid hands you a sheet of paper and asks you to write the alphabet, some numbers and a few symbols don't do it.

Oughbamanuts: Krispy Kreme Giving Away Doughnuts on Inauguration Day

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Krispy Kreme announced that they are giving away doughnuts next Tuesday.  What was that day again?  Oh yeah, some dude's officially starting his new job.  From the press release:

"Krispy Kreme is taking the inaugural festivities nationwide," said Ron Rupocinski, executive chef for Krispy Kreme. "We're inviting our fans in cities across the country, including Washington, D.C., to commemorate this historic day with a favorite American treat." 

The Inauguration Day promotional offer is good for one doughnut of choice per customer on Jan. 20. No purchase is necessary. To find a participating store near you, visit http://www.krispykreme.com/storelocator.html. 

How Much is Netflix Really Costing You?

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We've been members of Netflix forever and I've noticed that we use it in fits and starts.  Really it's my fault because I'm generally the one that goes to the website and selects the movies, and I get in trouble when I try to anticipate what everyone will want to watch.  When I do I pick "blah" movies that no one wants to watch, but I think the family is afraid to tell me because they don't want me to feel offended.  On the other hand, I don't want to turn them in because I figure at some point we'll all sit down to watch them.  So there they sit on top of the DVD player, sometimes for weeks on end.

Our heavy usage tends to occur when I find something I really like, say The Wire, and order all of the DVDs and watch them as soon as they come in and return them promptly so that I can watch the next DVD in the series.  Unfortunately that happens about every third month so our droughts are longer than our downpours and I've suspected for a while that we've been paying more than we would renting on an as-needed basis from Blockbuster.

All that's to explain why I immediately tried out FeedFlix when I read about it on Lifehacker.  I just plugged in an RSS feed from our account and within a few seconds I had all the info I could ever want on my family's Netflix usage (see image to the left).  Because our droughts are so long our average hold time for a movie is 7 days and our average cost to rent a movie over the lifetime of our account is a whopping $23.79.  That's nuts!

Now we could pull that down over time by making sure that we recycle our movies very quickly, and now that we can watch Netflix movies online at no additional cost and/or watch them via Tivo once our Tivo is updated then we could really pull that number down quickly.  As it is we're Netflix's dream customer and I hate being that.

So you Netflix customers out there: what are you spending per movie?

Staples Looking for Ten Thousand Winners

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Staples is running a promotion called Gift It for Free that is a sweepstakes that will have 10,000 winners who can fill up a shopping cart and get all the items for free. The promotion is running until Christmas Eve so visit the site and enter to win.

The promotion came to my attention because a rep from one of their agencies emailed me about it and about their social media efforts for the promotion, including a Facebook fan page, a Twitter profile, and several YouTube videos.  They've created a character called Coach Tom who believes there should only be one winner in anything (a play on the 10,000 winners) and they have fun with that theme with the videos.  I've pasted one below and if you click through to YouTube you'll see that there's several videos and they're pretty good. 

If a Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words Then…

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Since Google's hosting the archives of Life Magazine's photos they must be worth, uh, a googol of words.

Here are all the pictures that turned up for a search of Winston-Salem, the vast majority of which seem to have something to do with a clocks project by the Winston-Salem Evening Sentinel in 1951.  Kind of weird in a good way. Below is a picture of the paper with info about the clock premium (can anyone tell me if that's a newspaper box or microfiche reader?), I think, and a completely unrelated picture from Hanes Hosiery Mills.  Click on them to view the full size image:
EveningSentinelBig
 

HanesHosiery
 

When You Want to Leave Your Wife a Message but Not Actually Talk to Her

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Admit it, there are times you want to call someone and be guaranteed you don't actually talk to them but are still able to leave them a message.  You know the scenario: your wife calls and leaves you a message but you're getting ready for a meeting and don't have time to talk so you don't call her back and while you're in your meeting you get another message, left in that "I'm pissed that you're ignoring me" voice, asking where the blankety-blank you are and why you're being such a wank.  You can't very well say to her, "Honey I wanted to let you know I got your message but I didn't want to talk to you, because if I had you'd have kept me on the phone for 10 minutes about something totally trivial and out of my control and I really had to go into my meeting."**  Well, you could say that but then you'd be on the couch for a week.

**Please note that I've never, ever thought these things myself.  I swear.

My friends, technology has once again come to the rescue.  My friend Dan emailed me a link to a great service called SlyDial that allows you to dial a number and it automatically bypasses the ring and takes you directly to voice mail.  I downloaded the version for Blackberry and it works like a charm.  To be honest I have no idea how it works behind the scenes, but it's cool and it's free so I recommend it for any of you who love voice mail but don't like actually talking to anyone.

Can you think of scenarios where this could come in really handy?  Feel free to share.

DIY Cake in a Cup

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Kids bugging you for an afternoon snack and you don't have a thing in the pantry?  Well, let 'em nuke their own cake in a cup.  Here's the site with video goodness on how to do it, or just follow these instructions:

Grab the biggest microwavable coffee mug you've got in your cupboard,
and cover the inside with cooking spray. Mix up four tablespoons of
flour and nine tablespoons of hot chocolate mix, then throw in three
tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and one egg. Once it's
thoroughly mixed into an even batter, microwave the whole shebang for
three minutes on high.

Apparently the result is a rather gummy cake, but we all know kids ain't big on niceties like texture and in their world the goopier the better.

You Think Your Kid Can Hoop It Up?

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Not a lot I can add to this video because you really have to see it to believe it.  In case you don’t watch the whole thing I will tell you that at the end they reveal that this kid, who’s 11 and in the fifth grade, can run the mile in 4 minutes and 50 seconds and is expected to break the world record for his age when he’s officially timed.  BTW, the majority of the video is about his mad hoop skills.